Gas Men 2014
Filmed on the shores of Lake Michigan, Christopher Cozier's Gas Men shows two men in business suits wielding gas pump nozzles like trick-roping cowboys, performing masculine stereotypes common to early Hollywood Westerns. The artist examines the environmental impact of extractive oil economies as well as the social conditions resulting from centuries of colonial rule, enslavement, and forced labor, and more recently, postindependence political corruption in Trinidad. The sound accompanying the video creates a sense of geographic dislocation, recalling the dislocation of indentured Indian workers in rural plantations in Trinidad and throughout the Caribbean, while an ambulance siren further conjures the urban context of Port of Spain (Trinidad's capital), in all its complexity.
